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The tech industry isn’t against all legislative attempts to fight piracy. In fact, Google for one has even endorsed an alternative bill to SOPA called OPEN.

Explaining its opposition to SOPA and Senate doppelganger PIPA, Google’s Official Blog gave a plug for OPEN as an “alternative approach” and included a link outlining the bill.

Google’s not the only OPEN supporter. While Reddit, a major SOPA opponent, hasn’t endorsed OPEN, Erik Martin, the general manager of Reddit, says the bill is a “good start.”

So what is OPEN? The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, is a bill proposed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). Unlike SOPA and PIPA, which would require the Justice Department to police websites providing links to foreign-based Internet pirates, OPEN puts the International Trade Commission in charge of such enforcement. That would take the courts out of the equation.

Issa (pictured) is perhaps best known for triggering the 2003 recall effort in California that led to the ouster of Gov. Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwartzenegger. More recently, though, he’s emerged as a self-styled Internet libertarian, embracing the idea of harnessing the web and crowdsourcing to craft laws. Issa even uses a platform nicknamed Project Madison that lets members of the public offer comments on pending bills.

Issa was planning to introduce a version of OPEN in the House on Wednesday, as SOPA/PIPA online protests were rampant on the web. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) also introduced a Senate version of OPEN in November along with Sens. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Washington). That bill currently has about 40 co-sponsors.

One reason that the bills haven’t gotten much attention is that the entertainment industry isn’t behind them, primarily because of objections over the ITC’s ability to enforce online piracy. However, the bills are also being sidelined because of the focus on SOPA and PIPA and confusion over which House and Senate sub-committees should debate OPEN.

Tony Romm, a technology reporter with Politico, says that OPEN has some big flaws, including the fact that bringing a case before the ITC is costly. “[The entertainment industry] feels it’s a huge expense and smaller companies may not have the resources to press their case,” he says. 

Meanwhile, Congressional realpolitik also explains OPEN’s low profile so far. For a bill to ultimately get passage, it has to be referred to a sub-committee and then the chair of the sub-committee has to agree to pick the bill up. Romm says critics of SOPA have attempted to stall the bill by spreading it across various sub-committees. However, there’s often a lot of confusion over which sub-committees should debate tech-related bills. The Senate version of OPEN, for instance, has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee.

Such maneuvering explains why OPEN has had a relatively low profile, but if more tech firms get behind OPEN, that may change. Whether OPEN will emerge as a viable alternative to SOPA and PIPA remains to be seen. At the moment, proponents of those two bills are focused on keeping them alive while tech giants like Google and Reddit are trying to kill them.

''Taken from http://mashable.com''
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